DICKENS' AMERICAN NOTES. WESTERN STEAMERS.

Nelson Examiner and New Zealand Chronicle, Volume II, Issue 69, 1 July 1843, Page 276

DICKENS' AMERICAN NOTES. WESTERN STEAMERS.

If the native packets I have already described be unlike anything we are in the habit of seeing on water, these Western veasels are still more foreign to all the ideas we are accustomed to entertain of boats. I hardly know what to liken them to, or how to describe them. In the first 'place, they have no mast, cordage, tackle, rigging, or other such boat-like gear; nor have they anything in their shape at all calculated to remind one of a boat's head, stern, sides, or keel. Except that they are in the water, and display a couple of paddle-boxes, they might be intended, for anything that appears to the contrary, to perform some unknown service, high and dry, upon a mountain top. There is no visible deck, even ; nothing but a long, black, ugly roof, covered with burnt-out feathery sparks : above which tower two iron chimneys and a hoarse escape-valve, with a glass steerage-house. Then, in order as the eye descends towards the water, are the sides and doors and windows of the state-rooms, jumbled as oddly together as though they formed a small street built by the varying tastes of a dozen men : the whole is supported on beams and pillars resting on a dirty barge, but a few inches above the water's edge; and in the narrow space between this upper structure and this barge's deck are the furnace fires and machinery, open at the sides to every wind that blows and every storm of rain it drives along its paths. Passing one of these boats at night, and seeing the great body of fire, exposed as I have just described, that rages and roars beneath the frail pile of painted wood — the machinery not warded off or guarded in any way, but doing its work in the midst of the crowd of idlers and emigrants and children, who throng the lower deck — under the management, too, of reckless men, whose acquaintance with its mysteries may have been of six months' standing — one feels directly that the wonder is, not that there should be 60 many fatal accidents, but that any journey should be safely made. AMERICAN RAILROADS. I made acquaintance with an American railroad, on this occasion, for the first time. As these works are pretty much alike all through the States, their general characteristics are easily described. There are no first and second class carriages as with us ; but there is a gentlemen's car and a ladies' car ; the main distinction between which is, that in the first every body smokes, and in the second nobody does. As a black man never . travels with a white one, there is also a Negro car, which is a great blundering clumsy chest, sucli as Gulliver went to sea in from the kingdom of Brobdignag. There is a great deal of jolting, a great deal of wall, not much window, a locomotive engine, a shriek, and a bell. The cars are like shabby omnibuses, but larger— : holding thirty, forty, fifty people. The seats, instead of stretching from end to end, are placed crosswise. Each seat holds two persons. There is a long row of them on each side of the caravan, a narrow passage up the middle, and a door at both ends. In the centre of the carriage there is usually a stove, filled with charcoal or anthracite coal, which is for the most part red hot. It is unsufferably close, and you see the hot air fluttering between yourself and any other object you may happen to look at, like the ghost of smoke. In the ladies' car there are a great many gentlemen who have ladies with them. There are also a great many ladies who have nobody with them ; for any lady may travel alone from one end of the United States to the other, and be certain of the most courteous and considerate treatment everywhere. The conductor, or checktaker, or guard, or whatever he may be, wears no uniform. He walks up and down the car, and in and out of it, as his fancy dictates, leans against the door with his hands in his pockets, and stares at you if you chance to be a stranger, or enters into conversation with the passengers about him. A great many newspapers are pulled out, and a few of them are read. Everybody talks to you, or to any body else who hits his fancy. If you are an Englishman, he expects that that railroad is pretty much like an English railroad. If you say " No," he says " Yes ?" (interrogatively), and asks in what respect they differ. You enumerate the heads of difference one by one, and he says " Yes ?" (still interrogatively), and, it is quite evident, don't believe it. After a long pause, he remarks, partly to you and partly to the knob on the top of his stick, that " Yankees are reckoned a considerable of a go-ahead people, too ;" upon which you say " Yes ;" and then he says " Yes " again (affirmatively this time) ; and, upon your looking out of the window, tells you that behind that hill, and some three miles from the next station, there is a clever town in a smart 10-ca-tion, where he expects you have concluded to stop. Your answer in the negative naturally leads to more questions in reference to your intended route (always pronounced rout); and, wherever you are going, you in^ofcably learn that yon can't get there without immense difficulty and danger, and that all the great sights are somewhere else. If a lady take a fancy to any male passenger's seat, the gentleman ■who accompanies her gives him notice of the fact, -and he immediately vacates it with great politeness. Politics are much discussed, so are banks, so is cotton. Quiet people avoid the question of the Presidency, for there will be a new election jn three years and ahalf, and party "feeling runs very "high ; the great constitutional feature of this institution being; - that directly the acrimony of th« last election ;is over, the acrimony of the next begins ; which is an unspeakable comfort to all strong politicians and true lovers of their country — that is to say, to 99 men and boys out of every 994.